FIOS, BitTorrent and Traffic Shaping

September 4, 2007

I’ve been known to consume the occasional torrent (always something blatantly legal, of course), and being a good BitTorrent user, I maintain a reasonable seed ratio.

Lately I’ve been running into slow seeding on my FIOS line. Worse, I’ve had inordinate slowdowns on the rest of my traffic while seeding. Recently, this has clamped down so tightly that while seeding I’ve had trouble even sending mail on another workstation. It was looking fairly clear that Verizon was clamping down the BitTorrent traffic shaping on FIOS.

I run Azureus, and just by changing my encryption setting from “plain” to RC4, and enabling the “Lazy Bitfield” option, my seeding speeds jumped by an order of magnitude — and I can send email at the same time.

If you’re running BitTorrent over FIOS, you might want to give this a try…